“Is that the twenty-minutes-to or the ten o’clock?” asked another ghost anxiously.
“Ten,” said a freshman. “The other rang while we were chasing smiles.”
“Then we’re locked out,” cried a small ghost tragically, and three sheeted figures rushed down the hall, tripping over their flowing robes and struggling with their masks as they ran.
“My light is on. Will they report it?” asked little Ruth Howard shyly of Georgia Ames.
“Mine will be reported all right before I’ve done with it,” declared a ghost gloomily. “I’ve got to study for a physics review. I oughtn’t to have come near this festive function.”
“Same here.”
“Come on, Carline. Don’t you know the action of going home?”
“Jolly fun though, wasn’t it?”
The initiation party dissolved noisily down the dusky corridors.
Next day the college rang with the report that hazing was now practiced at Harding. Strange accounts of the Belden House party were passed from group to group of excited freshmen who declared that they were “just scared to death” of the sophomores and wouldn’t for the world be out alone after dark, and of amused upper-classmen who allowed for exaggerations and considered the whole episode in the light of a good joke. But a particularly susceptible Burton House freshman, who sat at Miss Stuart’s table and burned to make a favorable impression upon that august lady, repeated the story to her at luncheon. Miss Stuart received it in silence, wondered what the truth of it was, and asked some of her friends about it that afternoon at a faculty meeting. Of course some of the wrong people heard about it and took it up officially, as a matter calculated to ruin the spirit of the college. The result was that Miss Ferris and Dr. Hinsdale were furnished with the names of some of the offenders and requested to interview them on the subject of their misdemeanors. Miss Ferris unerringly selected Madeline Ayres as the ring-leader of the affair and Betty Wales as the best person to make an appeal to, if any appeal was needed, and set an hour for them to come and see her.